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Debate and Discourse: AWESOME POST in "[Chat] the Cradle of Love", by Passerbye

It's the word used for Indian (not native American)/Chinese laborers mainly in the mid-late 1800's by primarily Britain, and to a lesser extent the French and the Dutch among others, who were used en masse to replace the mostly black slave labor that had by then been outlawed by everyone except the USA. Neither India nor China had viable options for natives to make any sort of living during this time for reasons way too numerous to get into, which made those folks more inclined to sign on with companies who supplied Coolie labor for the imperial powers.

They weren't slaves in the sense that we think of today, more like indentured servants, but they were treated virtually the same and were more or less an "accepted" replacement for slave labor in the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands to do work that would have previously been done by slaves.

There was a short-lived pro-coolie (pro in the sense that they were viewed as a viable form of cheap/free labor by the burgeoning American industrial revolution and the massive expansion into the west) movement in the United States which actually took hold to a fairly large degree on the west coast but never produced anything substantial in the south to replace the freed slaves.

Anyway, during this period the term Coolie wasn't in of itself derogatory, it was the literal term used to describe this class of laborer; however the connotations it brought with it, regarding the value of the Asiatic races and the way the were treated were inherently racist by today's standards. Since there hasn't been coolieism since roughly WWI use of the term is now considered a racial slur against asiatic races.